547 Promote Synergy.

You can learn a lot about a person by how they talk about what they played with as a kid, or even how they played with what they played with. I was a very shy child. Didn’t live near kids my age mostly, and even in the rare times I did the experience was bad. So I played, by myself, with whatever action figures I had. I didn’t have a ton of toys, but I was very careful with the ones I liked best, so they lasted a very long time. A lot of my ability to write comes from playing. I write the same sorts of stories I used to act out with action figures. A lot of what was happening was dialogue and not action. At least part of the reason was that I usually had several good guys and one bad guy. Therefore, Starscream had to be the baddest Decepticon ever. (Decepticon is not in the Opera dictionary and that is bullshit.)

The toys that were best for making up stories were the ones that didn’t have really elaborate backstories, like M.U.S.C.L.E. (Kinnikuman in Japan) or Battle Beasts. Plus they could ride around in Star Wars vehicles. Since the figures were smaller the vehicles were more like playsets. I had the Emperor’s shuttle from the original Jedi line. It was easily one of the biggest toys I had as a kid and pretty much every toy that would fit inside it traveled the galaxy in it at least once. For the Battle Beasts it turns out that kind of made sense… XD

14 Comments

Having bought the crap out of Between Failures Volume 1 (just like the ad says I should) my copy arrived yesterday, and so compliments are in order. It’s very nice, everything I expected, and the back cover blurb is amusing. Well done! Keep up the good work!

It was mostly Power Rangers and other Bandai stuff in my case, and I didn’t really have any villains. My brother had a Darth Vader and a Destro (don’t really know how he got it, the original GI Joe series was a bit before our time), but all I really had were a couple of rather menacing rubber dinosaurs and a few small baddies from Happy Meals. It wasn’t that I could affordn’t them, it was just that I always ended up buying the heroes. Couldn’t tell you why, I guess I just liked the good guys better.

So, I had to make them, usually by combining parts from McDonald’s toys, parts from broken toys, old circuit boards, and whatever else I could find into “Toy Story”-esque mutants. Then I’d make castles and other buildings out of cardboard boxes for them to fight on. And in the end, if I ended up breaking a bad guy or two, I could always fix (or even improve them) with the hot glue gun.

You know, Reggie is so arrogant that I could see him responding with “She’ll support a decision that satisfies ME!” And then proceed to call on his aunt to get things set up the way he wants them. Reggie wouldn’t make a left-handed threat unless he was sure he could make good on in. Like I said earlier, I hope Mike has some ammunition lined up, because people like Reggie always seem to have contingency plans.

Of course Starscream was the baddest Decepticon ever. If Megatron hadn’t been reformatted into Galvatron, we would’ve witnessed his glorious reign over the Decepticons, as he led them to victory over Ultra Magnus.

When I grew up, I had a ton of He-Man action figures, and later became a fan of professional wrestling. Since I didn’t have any wrestling action figures, I created the Eternian Wrestling Federation, with tons of oddball stuff. Two-Bad could pull off a decent suplex, while most of the other figures were better off trying DDTs. I had Prince Adam and Faker as a tag team. Teaming up Skeletor with Battle Armor Skeletor (y’know, the one that actually spun) was weird, but hey, the World Wrestling Federation back then had two Undertakers at that one Summerslam, so whatever… I loaned some of my figures to a cousin, and took some of his Foot Clan toys from TMNT as collateral (good idea since he let someone else take them and ruin them), so the Foot Clan joined up as a faction. I never did promo set-ups, but man I put on some great matches.